Tiny Fort Bend County community tries to adjust as past meets future

FACING A CROSSROADSFour Corners — a slice of old Fort Bend, surrounded by the new

JEANNIE KEVER, Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Herlinda Williams gets her shaved ice order at The Ice Barn, 15910 Old Richmond Road (intersection of Old Richmond and Bellfort), in an area known as Four Corners, Tuesday, May 24, 2011, in Sugar Land, in Fort Bend County. Four Corners is a Fort Bend County neighborhood that is much like the county itself -- growing quickly with lots of new construction and very diverse, with mostly Latino, Asian and African-American residents. It spreads out from the intersection of Boss Gaston Road with Old Richmond Road and Richmond Gaines. less

Herlinda Williams gets her shaved ice order at The Ice Barn, 15910 Old Richmond Road (intersection of Old Richmond and Bellfort), in an area known as Four Corners, Tuesday, May 24, 2011, in Sugar Land, in Fort ... more

Photo: Karen Warren, Chronicle

Photo: Karen Warren, Chronicle

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Herlinda Williams gets her shaved ice order at The Ice Barn, 15910 Old Richmond Road (intersection of Old Richmond and Bellfort), in an area known as Four Corners, Tuesday, May 24, 2011, in Sugar Land, in Fort Bend County. Four Corners is a Fort Bend County neighborhood that is much like the county itself -- growing quickly with lots of new construction and very diverse, with mostly Latino, Asian and African-American residents. It spreads out from the intersection of Boss Gaston Road with Old Richmond Road and Richmond Gaines. less

Herlinda Williams gets her shaved ice order at The Ice Barn, 15910 Old Richmond Road (intersection of Old Richmond and Bellfort), in an area known as Four Corners, Tuesday, May 24, 2011, in Sugar Land, in Fort ... more

Photo: Karen Warren, Chronicle

Tiny Fort Bend County community tries to adjust as past meets future

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If Fort Bend County heralds the future of Texas — a place of growth and diversity, where the population increased by 65 percent over the past decade and almost two-thirds of residents are Latino, Asian or African-American — then Four Corners is where that future collides with the past.

Like the neighborhood that surrounds it, the snow cone stand is both a nod to the past and a symbol of what is to come, a place where people who have spent their lives in Four Corners rub elbows with those like Camacho and her friends from the surrounding suburban subdivisions.

Once an isolated enclave of extended families around the intersection of Old Richmond, Boss Gaston and Richmond Gaines roads, Four Corners has morphed into something bigger and harder to define, its aging small frame houses and mobile homes engulfed by the omnivorous spoils of growth.

“It’s about the same,” says James Cooper, 77, who has lived on Boss Gaston Road since 1947. “Just more people.”

Make that more of everything.

“When I first moved here, it was Old Richmond Road, and that was it,” says Carmen Martinez, a retired teacher who moved to the land owned by her husband’s family in 1966. “For groceries, we had to go to either Houston or Rosenberg. Now, we’ve got everything you could want.”

Except, say longtime residents, a sewer system.

Quadruple population

Four Corners, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, stretches beyond the original crossroads to encompass new homes west of Texas 6 and north of Bellfort, a 2.8-square mile microcosm of Fort Bend County.

The population has quadrupled since 2000, to 12,382, although not all of the newcomers identify with the old neighborhood and its inhabitants, even those living just a block away. More than 90 percent of residents are Asian, African-American or Latino; the number of Anglo residents also increased.

Fort Bend ranked No. 4 on a USA Today listing of the nation’s most diverse counties, created by calculating the probability that two people chosen at random would be of a different race or ethnicity; in Fort Bend, the probability was 75 percent.

Eschbach says the diversity is a product of Houston’s growth, as people from the city’s stratified neighborhoods — places including the Third Ward, Sunnyside and the East End — moved to suburban neighborhoods too new to have developed a racial identity.

“As a large minority middle class started to emerge, Fort Bend was virgin territory that all groups could move to,” he says.

The 2010 Census found the percentage of Anglo residents in Four Corners dropped over the past decade, even as the raw numbers increased.

Those who study residential integration say that isn’t unusual.

“Many minorities are looking for mixed communities, where whites might feel it’s more optimal to live in a subdivision that’s more homogeneous with their own group,” Eschbach says.

Tam Tran, who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, runs a manicure shop and day spa on Richmond Gaines Road, a mile or so from the crossroads.

It has been a good move, he said.

“There are a lot of Asians here,” he says. “Businesses are growing.”

The growth, rather than the large Asian presence, was the deciding factor in his decision to live and work in one of the new enclaves.

A common bond

Four Corners has always been a multicultural mashup, its residents united by poverty and an appreciation for life in the slow lane.

“We were always the Four Corners kids, the poor kids,” says Laura Muñoz, who, with her sister Diana Escareño, opened the Ice Barn three years ago.

That’s changing, as new subdivisions bring people with better jobs and bigger paychecks and long-time residents like Muñoz stay, even after they could afford to leave.

“We know everybody in the neighborhood,” Muñoz says to explain why she and her husband, Javier Muñoz Jr., still live near where they grew up.

“A lot of the residents have been there for decades,” he said. “I drove their school bus in 1965, and they still have their families there now.”

Some things change ...

Some things had changed by 1999, when Patterson was elected to the county commission. The muddy alleys had been paved, and much of the land parceled off for ever-smaller lots.

New subdivisions have brought new affluence, but Patterson says the old and the new remain separate, both literally and figuratively.

Municipal utility districts provided water and sewer service for the new homes, while people in the older section still relied on individual wells and septic systems.

“The new subdivisions are coming in with their MUDs, and you’re living right across the barbed wire fence,” Patterson says. “You’re going, ‘Why do they have water and sewer and we don’t?’”

County government jump-started the process for Four Corners’ original residents, who formed the Fort Bend Freshwater Supply District No. 2 and, with a federal grant, built a water system several years ago.

Martinez, the district president, said work on a sewer system will start later this year.

Longtime residents are eager — Muñoz and Escareño hope to expand once their land has sewer service — but not holding their breaths.